Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Anabolic Steroids in "Diet Pills"

[...] The supplement, which
is sold under the name Halodrol-50, contains a steroid that closely
resembles Oral-Turinabol, the principal steroid used to fuel East
Germany's secret, systematic sports doping program, according to Don
Catlin of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory.

Catlin said it
also contains DMT, or madol, a steroid federal authorities say was
developed for Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), the California
nutritional supplement company at the center of a scheme to provide
prominent professional athletes with undetectable performance-enhancing
drugs. [...]

Some may wonder why we should be worried about anabolic steroids.
Fortunately, Alan Alda explained it all. A copy of
his report has been provided here:

What Every Woman Should Know About Men
by Alan Alda, printed in Ms. Magazine

Everyone knows that testosterone, the so-called male hormone, is found
in both men and women. What is not so well known, is that men have an
overdose.

Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is
normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal
their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all
men are suffering from testosterone poisoning.

The symptoms are easy to spot. Sufferers are reported to show an early
preference (while still in the crib) for geometric shapes. Later, they
become obsessed with machinery and objects to the exclusion of human
values. They have an intense need to rank everything, and are obsessed
with size. [...]

Seriously, anabolic steroids are no laughing matter.
In the case of Halodrol-50, the substances were detected when
the Washington Post paid to
have diet products analyzed. Now that the banned substances
have been found, the FDA is investigating. While it is
good that the FDA is investigating, it bothers me that we have to
depend on a newspaper to find out about this kind of thing.
People
need to know that the FDA does not routinely perform studies on
products sold as "nutritional supplements."

The link below goes to a dummy account that automatically forwards email to the Federal Trade Commission's spam reporting service. Don't use it unless
you are a robot. Instead, act like a human and figure out the real address from this: joseph/dot/j7uy5/at-sign/gmail/dot/com

The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by an Ann Arbor reality-based, slightly-left-of-center regular guy who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times.
Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news.
Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.